HATE: Harness for Algorithm Testing and Evaluation

One of the most tedious tasks in writing software is making sure it works as expected -- and this goes some way to explaining why many programs have bugs in them. Although testing will never become a terribly exciting task for most people, it is possible to reduce the tedium of repetitive testing by writing test scripts that exercise programs.

In practice, test scripts are usually put together quickly, used to check out one piece of software, and then discarded. Experience shows that test scripts are often more prone to bugs than the software they are supposed to be testing! What is needed is a framework into which different tests may be fitted: this simplifies writing them and encourages their re-use.

Ensuring that a program is as bug-free as possible is not necessarily the whole story, especially in a research environment: one often needs to compare different algorithms in order to assess which is optimum. In this case, the different algorithms are typically applied to identical data and their performances compared statistically. This evaluation process also benefits from automation.

These tasks are precisely what HATE addresses: HATE is a test harness, a program that is intended to take the tedium out of testing and evaluating programs.

Some effort has been taken to ensure that HATE is totally independent of both the program being tested and the series of tests to be applied to the test program. The intention is to provide a single tool that may be used for both testing and evaluation; to encourage well-designed objective testing; and, by allowing researchers to apply the same sets of tests to their own programs, to make it easy for researchers to compare techniques on an informed basis.

The major features of HATE are:

• HATE is written in a high-level scripting language and may be used unchanged on any platform that the language supports. This includes all flavours of Unix; Linux; Windows NT, 95, 3.n; and the Macintosh.

• Test scripts may be used unchanged on all platforms.

• Test scripts are independent of the software being tested or evaluated.

• Programs are interfaced to HATE by means of a short interface procedure; thereafter, all relevant existing test scripts may be used with them.

• The decomposition into test script and interface procedure, and the portablity of HATE, encourage the sharing of scripts between developers or researchers.

• HATE is able to generate its output in a range of forms, including HTML and LaTeX tables.

HATE was developed principally to aid the evaluation of computer vision algorithms. There is increasing realization within the vision research community that this type of work is essential in converting computer vision from a "black art", with algorithms being tested on only a few images, to sound engineering practice. It is hoped that the vision community will develop test scripts that allow comprehensive comparisons of existing algorithms to be performed, and that new algorithms are subsequently compared with the existing body of results.

Further information is available on:

• downloading HATE
• installing HATE
• HATE's modes of operation
• using HATE
• interfacing programs to HATE
• writing test scripts
• the HATE program itself
• incorporating HATE into your own programs
• possible future enhancements

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